Monday, June 11, 2012

Mayor Jean Quan’s signature “100-block” crime-fighting plan doesn’t fare well in a nonprofit’s analysis of Oakland crime data. The Urban Strategy Council says that 90 percent of the city’s 3,601 homicides and shootings between 2007 and 2011 were dispersed over 1,303 of the city’s 6,560 blocks. It concludes: “This suggests that homicides and shootings are more dispersed throughout the city and not as concentrated in a 100-block neighborhood as the city suggests.” Details after the jump:

In order to deploy resources such as police presence most effectively, it behooves a city to know where criminal activity is most prevalent. Because of the impact on the City and its residents, of most concern are areas where shootings and homicides occur most frequently. This reasoning appears to be a driving factor in the Mayor's Safety Plan released in late 2011: according to the limited city documents released for the plan, 90% of homicides and shootings occurred in 100 blocks. To date the city has published a low resolution map of the 100 blocks but has refused to specify blocks, regions or to provide any useful methodology (exact data used, procedures, assumptions). As a very high profile project, it is unusual for there to be so much secrecy around the exact location of this place-based effort.

As a trusted community intermediary and data resource we have received dozens of inquiries regarding which 100 blocks are the focus of the plan and the crime statistics used to support the selection of these 100 blocks. Since the city chose not to release the details of the blocks or their methods and data, we decided to conduct our own analysis to see if we could develop a similar 100 blocks model with available data.